Blogs

Fast Features Ep. 1 — Scanning Badges with OCR

In this episode of XPressEntry Fast Features we demonstrate how access can be granted by scanning a printed number, found on any badge or drivers license. The XPressEntry Fast Features series showcases the great work of Telaeris’ engineering team. These videos provide a hands-on look into features used for:

Handheld badge verificationEmergency musteringHealth screening

Click below to see the video:

Want to see a quick demo of XPressEntry’s OCR feature in action? Check out the video below!

Video Transcript

Introduction
00:00:13 XPressEntry is an evolving product. It seems like every week we come up with some neat new features. Something our engineers came up with recently is how to capture data basically off of text. So I’m going to show you how that all works. It’s really simple.

Step 1
(00:00:38) First thing you’ll need to do is on the right here you’ll see our handheld. It’s in- now it’s in entry mode. We’re first going to enable the OCR feature in XPressEntry. So there’s our settings; I will do a quick search for where OCR is. It needs to be enabled. Search- there we go. This device that we’re working with is one of our standard Android devices. This is one of the reader profiles we’ve got set up in here.

How to get to OCR
(00:01:04) And we’ll look up- there is OCR. It’s nicely highlighted. We’re going to select that. We’re going to save it. Let’s just take a look to see in badge settings. OCR reads a single line. So sometimes you have text on a couple lines that you want to read. Generally you want to have a single line that you want to read for your OCR. So we’re going to select that as well. And the OCR features are here. This is saying that it’ll accept any alphanumeric characters. So we’re going to save those and you’ll see over here this new icon just popped up. This new icon is our OCR icon.

How to use OCR with XPressEntry
(00:01:42) So what I’m going to do right now is we’re going to scan an OCR off of a Driver’s license. We’re going to take a look at this driver’s license- now we’re going to focus on that. Let’s see if we can get a good- there we go. Let’s see if we got it. Um…. you want to double check DR- the D83772430, great! Ah! This user isn’t in our database. Well, what are we going to do about that?

How to enroll a user
00:02:22 So let’s go back into our Enroll Mode. Switch modes to Enroll Mode. This guy’s name is Roberts. We’re going to capture his driver’s license. There we go! This is correct; we’re going to put it right into the database. We’re going to capture this image here… What I’m going to do is- I’m just going to capture an image right off of the… let’s see if I can get a nice picture. There we go. And we’re going to click at the top “Enroll User”. You can see that he just got enrolled. Now if we- so imagine a user just drove up to your gate. He’s a visitor, you wanted to enroll him but this is the only identification he has. So you put him in the database… So now when he comes back the next time…

Testing a new user with OCR
(00:03:36) Let’s switch over to Entry/Exit Mode. You can see what’s going on here and you can see that last time that guy came in he was denied because he was an unknown user. So we’re going to scan his driver’s license again. There we go! Say that’s good.. And that user has not been allowed access into the system yet because he was just enrolled and nobody actually gave him the permission. So if we really wanted to have him in the system we would give him appropriate permissions. But you can see there he is. He showed up, and all of that was done just using the number on the driver’s license. Of course we can read the barcode at the back of the driver’s license if that’s what the customer wants, but there are some credentials where you are- all you want to do is have a number on the credential. This is a nice easy way to track that. So it’s- it’s a new feature we just added and that would be nice to share.

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